Klarinet Archive - Posting 001059.txt from 1998/05

From: Mark Charette <charette@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] mail limitations ...
Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 20:21:54 -0400

I'd like to offer anyone on the Klarinet list who is fed up with
mail limitations a mailbox on sneezy. You have to be able to reach
the Internet, and you'll have to use an external mail agent like Eudora
Lite. Currently, because of AOL mail limits, we're sending out 5 or
6 digests a day, kind of defeating the purpose. I'd like to send out
only 2 or 3 a day; less clutter for the digest readers.

There are limits on some of the free e-mail services (like juno's
64K limit), but AOLs limit of about 27K per message seems arbitrarily
low.

This is AOLs response to the problem of long messages:
> Dear charette,
>
> I am writing to you on behalf of America Online in response to your
> recent question.
> Mail Size Limits
>
> INCOMING MAIL (mail that's sent to you):
>
> Our mailer will split large incoming Internet mail messages so
> that you will receive long messages in their entirety. The
> current limit for incoming Internet mail is 1Mb. If your message
> has been split, you'll see a mail header that indicates #1(3),
> #2(3), etc., depending upon how many parts it was necessary to
> split the message into.
>
> Incoming mail size is limited to about 27K. So, if you receive
> a message that is 40K in length, you'll see the message delivered
> in two separate email messages.
>
> OUTGOING MAIL (mail that you send):
>
> If you are using the DOS version of the America Online software,
> your outgoing email messages cannot exceed 32K in length. If you
> run the latest versions of both the Windows and Macintosh America
> Online system, your email messages will be limited to 64K in
> length.
>
> If you do not have the latest version of the software for Windows
> or Macintosh installed on your computer, please use keyword UPGRADE
> and download the software free. Please be sure to read the File
> Description for full installation instructions.
>
> If you wish to send a long text file to another America Online
> member, we suggest you attach the file using the Attach File option
> on Compose Mail. Attach File is not yet available when sending mail
> to an Internet address.
>
> We understand that some members find these limits rather small for
> their purposes and have encouraged us to increase them. This is
> currently under consideration by our development staff, but no
> definite plans to do so have been announced.
>
> Thank you for using America Online. We hope that you will
> continue to enjoy the service.
> --------------
> name: Mark Charette
> email: charette@-----.com
> subject: E-mail length
> message: As a manager of the Klarinet (clarinetist's) mailing list, I
> am getting complaints from members because the digest version of
> this very active mailing list causes AOL to download the mail as a
> separate document. This makes it very inconvenient to reply to
> specific section of the digest; people must do a cut & paste for
> followup. I've had digests as small as 27K trigger this behaviour.
> As it is, I'm distributing digest 6 or 7 times a day, negating
> their usefulness (subscribers to the digests would like to see one
> or two digests a day). Is there anything our AOL members can do,
> other than _not_ using AOL's mail service, to increase the size
> that triggers this behavior?
>
> Thank you

Their response on the limited mailer is now filed under "More
reasons not to use AOL". If they didn't have such good chat areas
they'd have nothing at all. IMNSHO.
--
Mark Charette | "This is a very democratic organization, so let's
charette@-----. All those who disagree with me, raise
MIKA Systems, Inc.| their hands." - Eugene Ormandy
Webmaster of http://www.sneezy.org/clarinet, The Clarinet Pages

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